There’s a line in one of my favorite novels, Snow Crash, where the threat of the title is explained to the main character, and he can’t quite get his head around it.

“This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?”
Juanita shrugs. “What’s the difference?”

Shut the fuck up, it was less heavy-handed in 1992. Anyway, this pretty well sums up my feelings about a brand where, if I say its name, you don’t know if I’m talking about a television show or a restaurant. There’s a weird Marshall McLuhan/Videodrome quality to that idea that gives me a sour, orange feeling behind my eyes. You can’t eat reality television! I said.

I was wrong. There is no better way to describe this place than “trying to eat television.”

SLN readers are a pretty savvy bunch, so I’m sure all of you are veritable dark web experts at this point. Well, recently I’ve been digging real deep into the archives of the pre-Bitcoin version of infamous drug clearinghouse Silk Road, before it got all commercialized and popular. It used to be a really thoughtful place where people wouldn’t just sell drugs, they’d discuss and catalog their experiences with them. The trip report archive was wiped long before the rest of it when they rebranded and focused on Bitcoin transactions, sadly, but I was able to snag a couple of incomplete mirrors by trading some giraffe vore .mkvs to my resourceful Russian friend Sergei. Presented here are three choice finds from my trawling.

Okay, so let me preface this with, I am normally a pretty vanilla dude. Some weed, some coke on fridays with the boys at the office, a couple of wine coolers and some heroin with sunday brunch, you know, pretty standard stuff, right? I am not adventurous, is what I am saying. I like to keep things routine and moderate. So, believe me when I say that I was a little apprehensive at first, getting handed a Tic-Tac container full of weird forest green pills at a house party. This guy says, “you’ve gotta try this, bro, it’s the latest thing!” I mean, if it’s the latest thing, why not, right? So I’m like okay I’ll give these a shot. BIG MISTAKE. Blacked out fuckin immediately, and I swear to god I came to literally a fuckin’ month later. A MONTH. And this was apparently a really productive month for me, because I am not in my apartment, or even my home fucking city. I am on a yacht off the coast of Spain with a woman our (consensual, he said) sex slave tells me is my wife. He speaks fluent English, but she…. does not. Nothin’ but Castilian Spanish, and she’s acting surprised that I can’t understand her! I guess I must’ve learned to speak it during that blacked-out month, because I still find myself dropping into vulgar Castilian Spanish whenever a soccer game doesn’t go my way. Can’t for the life of me speak it at any other time, though.

Username: WelcomeToNeuYawkDrug & Dosage: A variety of unidentified “research chemicals” from university science lab, between 30 and 50 mL each

Listen. My first year of grad school was rough. My mother had just died thousands of miles away, my girlfriend decided that she was, in fact, not bisexual after all and ran off to marry her high school sweetheart back in Tennessee, and my cat never really forgave me for stepping on his tail the preceding winter. I’m not making excuses, here, really, I’m just trying to provide some perspective. Some context for why I started grabbing expired shit from the 1970s with faded labels off the shelves in the old science building and just fuckin injecting them into my eyeballs like I didn’t care if I lived or died. Because I didn’t. My cat sure as shit didn’t, and once you’ve lost that you’ve REALLY lost everything.

Anyway. So some of this shit was sort of equivalent to getting drunk, some of it was a little more interesting, some of it was responsible for eighteen paintings in one night that are currently fetching exorbitant prices at a gallery in Brooklyn. It was wild and wacky stuff. Grad school means teaching, and teaching means long nights grading papers, and that gets really boring if you aren’t squirting research chemicals into your tear ducts. My student evaluations came back mediocre and unremarkable, so who gives a fuck, in the end? NOT I. And not my fucking goddamn ungrateful piece of shit cat either. I still have him, for some reason, by the way. He’s healthy as a horse, turns 17 this year, and still hasn’t forgiven me for that time I stepped on his tail.

Username: AtreidesNutsDrug & Dosage: Oregano/allspice mixture with “secret ingredient,” used as dry rub on a half-pound of grilled flatiron steak

[The text is a piece of ASCII art that forms the sentence “THERE WILL BE NO REGRETS WHEN THE WORMS COME” in unnecessarily large letters.]

The mid-Eighties were a tumultuous time for the already-struggling Value Comics. Their parent company had just sold off numerous assets to stay afloat, their printers were having great difficulty acquiring green ink, and their two biggest competitors were beginning to advance in storytelling and art in ways Value simply didn’t intend to keep up with.

As tends to happen, it was decided that a line-wide shake-up was the best way to revitalize interest in a stable of characters who had been around in some form or another since the mid-50s. Cataclysm in Space had far-reaching effects on the VCU, even if it did ultimately fail to improve Value’s standing in the industry. In addition to some long-needed changes to the status quo of the line’s major characters, the event did much to streamline their oft-convoluted, frequently contradictory histories.

MarchJennifer Lawrence brings her quirky and irreverent charms to the Armenian genocide in Lars Von Trier’s The Girl Who Was Death, Part 1 of 3. James McAvoy and Charlie Day are exterminators who fall in love with the same unhygienic heiress in the hilarity-packed Roach Maiden. Terry Crews and Lance Reddick are profoundly uncomfortable as The Only Nonwhite People Who Were Invited To This Party.

AprilSaoirse Ronan, who is 22, plays the love interest who revitalizes a gross middle-aged writer in The Awakening of My Wrinkled Loins. Cameron Diaz and Jessica Alba take a european hiking trip together to get over their awful exes and find out more about themselves and each other than they bargained for in Lurid Latina Lesbians in Latvia. Charlie Hunnam and Rinko Kikuchi join a knitting group and gossip with old ladies in the wholly violence-free Pacific Rim Gaiden: A Scarf For Mako.

MayIoan Gruffudd and George Clooney are gay accountants in The Love Ledger. Riz Ahmed and Aziz Ansari are the only ones who can stop a daring bitcoin heist in near-future Bangkok in the cyberpunk thriller Blockchain. Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey reteam in the screwball comedy The Drag Queen In Yellow: A Sexy Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge.

Kompjuter! Magazine, July 1995Yahoo! Auctions, starting bid $0.35
This back issue of the seminal Maltese computer gaming mag is in near-mint condition with light shelf wear and includes the original cover disc. Inside is the infamously controversial top 25 list that nearly led to a military confrontation between Malta and Italy, four screenshots of a Doom clone that was never released, and an interview with the civil servant whose job it was at the time to censor exposed knees and elbows on game box art with stickers. The cover disc contains eighteen demos and shareware releases, among them a Latvian turn-based strategy game with battles resolved by a minigame heavily resembling “Go Fish,” a Wolfenstein 3-D clone set during the Spanish civil war, and an executable that seems to just print “SEX” and “DEATH” over and over to the DOS prompt.

A half-dozen porcelain cats in various posesEtsy, $299They’re adorable, hand-painted, and can also be found on AliExpress for 30 bucks or so. The seller’s entire shop inventory can in fact be found on AliExpress for under 50 dollars apiece, and everything is tagged “steampunk” regardless of relevance.

Burt the Bear Teaches ProgrammingBarnes & Noble, $11.99Let your kids learn to program in Python with this helpful cartoon guide narrated by TV’s Burt the Bear. Included tutorial projects begin with a simple “hello world” and then branch out in many different directions, from a tax calculator to a program that just prints “SEX” and “DEATH” over and over to the command prompt.